Do you find any business that runs successfully with no marketing? Probably not. Marketing is the heart and soul of every business. Without marketing, no company achieves success. Everyone’s goal is to get the best results from their marketing efforts that bring more profits.
The marketing strategies, techniques, or methods might differ for different companies and businesses. Nowadays, digital marketing methods are widely used by business owners. Ultimately getting results and making profits is the only motto of all businesses.
Marketing
Before getting into the actual topic, let’s understand what is marketing.
Marketing can be defined in many ways. In simple terms, it refers to the activity that promotes the buying or selling of a product or service, and also it is the process of understanding your customers, and building and maintaining a relationship with them. Likewise, it can be defined in many more ways.
There are two major methods of marketing:
Now the question is which marketing method helps in getting better results? Whether to go with traditional marketing (offline) or digital marketing (online). The answer is quite difficult. It purely depends on the nature of the business or a product.
Traditional Marketing
Digital Marketing
Nowadays most people use smartphones and are connected to the internet. So it would be better to add a digital marketing method and its techniques for the businesses which yield better results and help in generating more revenue for the business owner.
Traditional Marketing: Traditional marketing refers to any kind of marketing that isn’t online.
Examples- Television, Newspaper, Radio, Magazine, etc.
Digital Marketing: Digital marketing is the component of marketing that utilizes the internet and online-based technologies.
Examples- Social Media, Blogs, Websites, etc
Key differences between Traditional and Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing
When it comes to digital marketing there are numerous digital marketing consultants, and experts out in the market. Every individual has his own skills. Depending upon the nature of the business, respective expertise needs to be hired and they take care of the business digitally.
But what if you have a small business or a start-up? You might not be able to hire an expert due to insufficient funds or the business itself running on lesser profits. In this situation, what can you do?
The answer is very simple. You can do it by yourself. Yes, this might sound unrealistic but true. You can just kick-start digital marketing at an entry-level by understanding the fundamentals. Later, the experience and proper research and analysis make you become an expert. Otherwise, if you have enough funds you can hire a team and they further manage if you want to. But above all, understanding basics or fundamentals is very important.
In this article, I’m briefing the basics of various digital marketing methods that every business owner should know and must be aware of. This article helps you understand the concepts of digital marketing and might set in motion to get started with the digital marketing journey.
Major types of Digital Marketing:
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Email Marketing
Content Marketing
Affiliate Marketing
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
SMM is the use of social media or social networks to build a brand or to promote a company’s products and services. It involves creating tailored content for each platform to drive engagement, generate traffic, and conversions, and promote the business. Social media is one of the most employed digital marketing methods to get faster results.
SMM is very helpful in directly connecting with your audience and customers. This would be very great in listening to your audience, looking into the queries, and having a real-time interaction. The major social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, and WhatsApp too.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEM is a form of digital marketing method used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). SEM is usually a paid ad but SERPs can also be organic ones and it is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
These ads are usually termed Pay Per Click (PPC). It has a variety of formats like text ads, image ads, and video ads. It allows advertisers to promote the product with varied visual appearances which creates an intent to buy who is precisely searching in the search engine with particular keywords.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of improving the organic traffic to a website or a web page and ranks higher which results in better visibility from search engines. The higher the visibility the higher the traffic, and the higher the traffic more sales. That’s how SEO is very important in digital marketing methods. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic.
Majorly SEO has two elements, on-site and off-site. On-site SEO means controlling and optimizing the site internally like headlines, images, content, title and description, internal links, etc. This is the process completely taken care of inside our website.
Off-site SEO is external links for our site elsewhere on the web and this is called link building a press release, social media mentions, etc. where they mention your site in their posts, blogs, websites, etc. and this is completely outside our website.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a powerful digital marketing method that can make the customers on your email list and make them aware of new products, discounts, and other services. There are several types of Emails like informative emails, promotional emails, survey emails, feedback emails, thank you emails, etc.
It is very essential to build relationships with potential customers or clients and Email marketing fits great for consistent communication and making them aware of your presence regarding products or services.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is the heart of the various digital marketing methods focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online. It includes things like educational articles, e-books, videos, entertainment, and webinars that answer specific questions people have.
Proper content plays a vital role in converting an interested audience into buying customers. It is also one of the great choices and it is very helpful in increasing brand awareness, improving search engine rankings, and generating audience interest.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the process by which an affiliate earns a commission for marketing another person’s or company’s products. There are influencers, bloggers, websites, and many others who create backlinks to the site that help generate leads or sales.
If you want to become an affiliate marketer, first you need to find the right platform. Here the merchant gives the unique affiliate link for you and you can publish this link in your blog, website, or social media. When someone clicks on that link and makes a purchase, the merchant gives some part of his profit as a commission and this is called an affiliate program.
Lead Generation
After several methods, we succeeded in finding the right interested audience, this is called a lead, and the process involved is called Lead generation. Some might fill out the form by sharing their contact details some subscribed to the channel or newsletter or some might visit the site/landing page and this depends upon the kind of marketing efforts. Let’s illustrate this with the example.
Let’s say you are interested in buying life insurance. Your search for life insurance in the search engine. It gets you numerous search results combined of both paid ads (text ad, display ad, banner ad, etc.) and organic ones (search engine results). Usually paid ones are at the top followed by organic.
You visit the insurance company’s website by clicking on any of the links. There you will be encouraged to fill few details like name, email, contact number, date of birth, etc. Later one of the executives will call you regarding the insurance choices. Here you become a lead for an insurance company by sharing your details and the process that brings you to their site either paid or organic is called lead generation. This is the benefit of digital marketing. We can target the customer based on his interests and choices and they are likely to turn into potential customers.
In the same above example, it seems awkward that insurance companies directly call random people for the insurance choices without knowing whether they are interested in insurance are not. Do they really succeed in getting sales, yes but very rarely. Without knowing the personal interest, promoting the business randomly like advertising on television, radio, and the newspaper has no guarantee whether the marketing efforts reach the right audience. This is traditional or offline marketing. And we can’t deny that these marketing efforts have their own benefits depending on the nature of the business.
Web Analytics
Another important concept in digital marketing is Web Analytics.
Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, reporting, and presentation of web data for understanding and optimizing web usage. Web analytics allows you to precisely study the user behavior in the website.
It is a process of measuring web traffic and user behavior on the site and is also used as a tool for business and market research which results in improving the effectiveness of a website.
Numerous site measurements can be tracked easily in web analytics. Below are a few of them.
- Traffic
- Bounce rate
- Traffic sources
- New and returning users
- The flow of a web visitor
- Behavior
- Content engagement
- Devices
- Demographics
- Conversions
- Event tracking
- Annotations
- Page loading time
- Campaign data
- Keyword searches
Conclusion:
Everyone needs to understand the basic concepts of Digital Marketing. Nowadays people are connected to the internet very widely and they tend to search online, visit sites, and make purchases online based on their needs. This goes on increasing and becoming more and more these days. If we succeed in giving the best web presence for the business, most sales come in and increase the revenue.
So, it is very important to understand the basic concepts of digital marketing, its methods, and terminologies as there is no business without a web presence in the near future and if you want to succeed in a Digital Marketing career, you should have a thorough knowledge of all the digital marketing methods and must be highly qualified in at least one or two.
Do you want to know what makes you become a successful digital marketer? Click here to read another blog post to know more about it.
Pingback: Looking up for a Digital Marketing? Is this suited for you?
Pingback: Digital Marketing for Doctors in 2022 - Easy & Free Approach